Both Obama and Trump are on the campaign trail, but only one of them appears to be descending into madness

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Barack Obama versus Donald Trump. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.

Obama is back on the campaign trail for the midterms, still electrifying crowds, earning shouts of “We love you!” and skewering his successor. “What’s up with the gold?” he asked a crowd in Detroit. “I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” This has, predictably, set off a mini culture war involving questions of elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.

The entrepreneur turned fraudster is the subject of an Oscar-tipped new documentary that takes an unusual look at her strange legacy

David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different.

“The accent changed: this deep voice, very serious,” Agus, a medical oncologist, recalls by phone from Los Angeles. “It was as if I had met a person and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before.”

The president reportedly chose Zacharia after seeing her on television, but her first press briefing and disastrous interviews sealed her fate

And so Katie Zacharia joins the mayfly ranks of Liz Truss, Anthony Scaramucci, New Coke, CNN+ and Quibi. To say she burned twice as bright and half as long would be too kind. She went out like a firework on a soggy night.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Zacharia was leaving her role as press secretary after just five days on the job. No one was surprised after a lacklustre press briefing debut and scrutiny over her legal credentials.

Claims that James Talarico suffered a mental health crisis spread across rightwing media, offering a warning about disinformation ahead of the US midterm election

Where is James Talarico? The question ricocheted around rightwing echo chambers before metastasising into a conspiracy theory – and a reminder of the persistent danger of disinformation in the US midterm elections.

The smear campaign began when Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas, was not seen in public for nine days. His campaign was slow to explain why. While nature abhors a vacuum, Donald Trump and social media seize on one and weaponise it.

Katie Zacharia’s maiden briefing was excruciating – at least her predecessor had delivered her propaganda hot

Well, that was weird. Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, made her debut on the podium on Tuesday with all the warmth, wisdom and political dexterity of an AI avatar.

Zacharia was all stilted delivery, nervous tics and lack of eye contact. With an eerie lack of emotion, she served up pro-Trump talking points, took only three questions and vanished after 14 minutes. It was like the West Wing had turned into uncanny valley.

The tourist attraction just unveiled an elaborate, full-scale overhaul to match Trump’s second-term aesthetic

Sitting behind a replica Resolute Desk, nine-year-old Sydney Wright posed for the camera like a future US president. “I love it,” she smiled. And what about the dazzling gold appliqués, gold leaf and gold trim surrounding her? “It’s cool.”

Sydney was among a steady stream of visitors on Thursday to The People’s House: A White House Experience, an interactive museum – with an orientation film narrated by The West Wing star Martin Sheen – at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, just 150 yards from the real thing.

Pentagon said execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be broadcast live

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The US is facing worldwide condemnation over a “barbaric” plan to execute a disabled man by firing squad and livestream it to the public, with critics comparing the Trump administration to dictatorships in Iran and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.

Trump briefly stepped away from the microphone after one protester appeared to approach the stage

Donald Trump’s latest campaign rally was rocked by repeated protests on Wednesday as the US president urged Texas voters to back the embattled Senate candidate Ken Paxton.

At least half a dozen demonstrators interrupted the US president during his remarks in San Antonio, with some led away by police. One was physically assaulted by an older Trump supporter as he tried to leave the arena.

Listening to the president at a rally these days is a mix of deja vu and word salad, but his decade-long project of division remains abnormal and dangerous

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Donald Trump’s campaign rallies can be repetitive. Very repetitive. He calls himself the “greatest” president leading the “greatest” movement inside the “greatest” economy. He rails against “Dumocrats” for the “transgender mutilization” of children. He lambasts the “fake news” and reheats election lies. He describes illegal immigration as an “invasion” and recites the poem The Snake.

If we were all frogs being slowly boiled alive, we’ve now reached the stage of blackened toad. After a decade of this, presidential utterances that would once have caused outrage are met with a shrug. We are no longer shockable. Or so we thought.

Rallies have been mainstay of president’s brand but even some in his own party fear voters are sick of the sight of him

“Get your asses in that car.” That was Donald Trump’s order, he later recalled, to his motorcade after foul weather grounded Air Force One in Texas on Thursday. The 85-mile dash to Oklahoma at nearly 100mph was proof that nothing can keep Trump from a Trump rally.

Which might not be the good news for Republicans it once was. As the US president embarked on a 32-day campaign blitz aimed at helping them defend narrow congressional majorities in next month’s midterms, some fear that he is driving them towards an electoral wipeout.

Robert P Jones argues that declining white Christian influence has fuelled an alliance with Trump, and warns it is reshaping US democracy

The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).

Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes.

Outgoing secretary Lonnie Bunch rejects claims the institution is unpatriotic, telling audience ‘You cannot understand all without illuminating the dark corners’

Lonnie Bunch, the outgoing secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, has defended the organisation against political interference, insisting that telling the unvarnished and complex truths of history is an act of “great love” for the country.

Speaking on Friday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, Bunch received a standing ovation from hundreds of audience members and rejected claims that the institution’s staff or exhibitions were unpatriotic.

Xi’s state visit to the US emphasized personal rapport with the US president, rather than substantial agreements to pause their respective countries’ AI arms race

Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping wrapped up their Washington summit on Friday, facing criticism that they had squandered an opportunity to pause their countries’ artificial intelligence (AI) arms race.

The three-day state visit emphasised pageantry and personal rapport rather than substantial agreements. The US president and Xi discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the status of Taiwan. Their biggest policy announcement was a modest two-month extension of a trade truce.

Experts and insiders explain how To Catch A Predator became the most controversial show on 2000s TV

A man from Long Beach, California, is here to have sex with someone he believes is a 13-year-old girl. When the journalist Chris Hansen walks in, the man’s stomach drops. He is caught, and it is the end of his life as he knew it. Hansen asks what his fate should be. “The electric chair?” he asks. No, replies Hansen. “Dateline NBC.”

This is the opening scene of Primetime, a film directed by Lance Oppenheim, released in the US this week (a UK release follows on 30 October). It explores how a network news show turned sting operations into must-see television, raising a host of ethical questions about justice, voyeurism and society’s willingness to dehumanise certain offenders for profit and entertainment.

Deference was deafening as US president rolled out red carpet for world’s biggest jailer of journalists – perhaps he was seeking tips

One is an authoritarian who represses the media with a strong allergy to democratic elections. The other is head of the Chinese Communist party.

Donald Trump welcomed the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to the White House on Thursday, setting the stage for a scene quite unlike anything the august old building has seen over more than two centuries.

In an interview before the White House’s media ban, Carlson called on reporters to push back against Trump’s misogyny

Donald Trump has achieved something rarely seen in Washington: uniting rival television networks against him. When he banned CNN and MS Now – along with Politico – from the White House, their competitors suspended shared coverage of the US president’s events.

Gretchen Carlson, a journalist, author and former Fox News host, hopes this will not be the only example of solidarity from a White House press corps facing what she describes as an “outright onslaught” from the administration.

Fears persist about Trump ‘sucking up’ to Xi on Taiwan, but few concrete outcomes anticipated from US meeting

When Xi Jinping, China’s leader, touches down in Maryland on Wednesday, he will step out into the arms – perhaps a hug, if Donald Trump’s wishes come true – of a US president who has shown China more bonhomie than any of his recent predecessors.

The meeting between Xi and Trump this week will be the second time that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies have talked face to face this year. At the previous summit, held in Beijing in May, there was much talk of building a “strategic stability” between the two powers. But there was little by way of concrete outcomes: the countries remain at loggerheads over trade, export controls and geopolitics.

Republican president said he hoped the democratic socialist would be a ‘great mayor’ for New York City

Donald Trump said on Monday that he hoped Zohran Mamdani would be a “great mayor” for New York, an unusually warm assessment of the democratic socialist leader whom the president and his Republican allies have spent months holding up as a symbol of the Democratic party’s alleged embrace of “communism” ahead of the November midterms.

At a news conference following their closed-door meeting at Gracie Mansion, Trump and Mamdani appeared friendly as they have in previous meetings. Mamdani said he and Trump held a “wide-ranging” discussion, which touched on affordable housing and immigration, but did not offer extensive details regarding any disagreements between them.

Defiance from the supreme court and the Federal Reserve chair in one week ... how ever will the US president cope?

“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business,” Michael Corleone tells his brother, Sonny, in The Godfather. But for Donald Trump, it’s always personal. And he leaves this week feeling betrayed.

First, the US supreme court rejected his effort to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform. “They are merely a shell of their original selves.”

Ruling comes amid demolition threats by Donald Trump after being stymied from adding his name to centre

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to give at least 30 days’ notice before moving to demolish the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after the US president warned that it could be “ripped down”.

The US district judge Christopher Cooper issued the order on Thursday after lawyers for the Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty submitted evidence of Trump’s comments and sought clarification over whether the building could be closed or bulldozed.